It would be nice if more people were polite, wouldn't it?
These issues are vastly more complex than Heinlein's little one-shot sound bites would lead one to believe (as much as I thoroughly enjoyed Time Enough for Love and yearned to live in that world as I was growing up, entire chapters are little more than clever sound bites with nothing to support their veracity. It is science fiction, and good science fiction at that, but the key word here is "fiction.")
Yes, I would like to see people be more polite, but there are other means than threat of death by firearms to encourage politeness in a society. Furthermore, armed societies such as Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, Serbia, Chechnia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, etc. are hardly models of polite society, so I think we can dismiss the veracity of Heinlein's little quipp simply by taking a look around our own, contemporary, and very real world.
Plus, isn't an armed citizenry quite a deterrent for casual crime...?;-)
It may well be (assuming citizens are allowed to "pack" as well as "own," something they are not in many parts of the USA), but it is also quite a facilitator for crimes of "passion", such as road rage, momentary madness stemming from anger, etc.
How do the two balance out? I don't know. Like the original person posting the question, I would like very much to see a dispassionate study done on these issues, and let the chips fall where they may.
My biases have been pro gun control (after living in Europe for many years and growing used to the relatively low crime rates there), anti-gun control (after seeing the atrocities committed by troups upon unarmed civilians in Kosovo, Bosnia, etc. a few hundred short kilometers from where I had lived in such peace), to now a very mixed perception, and a conclusion that I simply do not know which side of the argument is more correct than the other, and can recognize that both sides have compelling aspects to their argument.
So I too would like to see an unbiased study, and contrary to many here, I think such a study is emminently possible, if one can gather knowledgable people with the professional and scientific ethic to place good science above their own personal political and social opinions. Such people do exist, and while they may have become more rare in this age of political conformity (from both the right and the left), there are still plenty around to conduct such a study, if the need and interest should ever reach the necessary threshold.
Yes, and less jobs. If every city were like Largo, the IT labor market would be even more horrible than it is now.
Only for MSCEs. Does anybody really care about them anyway?
Seriously, the wages of competent admins will go up, the wages of marginal admins, or admins with skill sets inappropriate to a free software/open source and/or *NIX environment will plummet. So what? It isn't the job of government to employ, it is the job of government to get the best value per dollar for each tax dollar spent, and using a free platform such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD is clearly head and shoulders above Microsoft's proprietary platform in providing exactly that value.
c'est la vie... MSCEs can retrain themselves, or find a different line of work.
This is GOOD for Sysadmins!
on
Largo Loving Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I also was impressed that they spend less than half the money other towns do on their IT. Of course, from the sysadmin POV that's bad as it means they aren't paid much. But that's the price of freedom, I guess.
One of the real plusses of being UNIX savvy in general, and GNU/Linux/free software/open source savvy in particular, is that one actually often earns a better living than their Microsoftoid equivelents. Why? Because paying one knowledgable person who, in a GNU/Linux, *BSD, or *NIX shop can do the work that requires three or four MSCE's (assuming a modicum of competence on the MSCE's part, an assumption that is, as many here have pointed out repeatedly, is not one that is safe to make), 1.5 - 2 times the salary still translates into a tremendous human resources savings, and brings with it the added benefits of expertise, lower turnover, and attention to detail (and research) pointed out in this article.
If you are saving money because your staffing requirements are lower (in raw numbers of bodies), your licensing costs are lower, and your TCO costs are lower (all nearly always true with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD vs. Microsoft), you can pay a premium for really good people and have the benefits that brings along with tremendous savings.
Which is great for everyone, except shoddy admins who probably should find another line of work anyway. It is certainly great for those of us who know what we are doing and take pride in doing quality work for our clients/employers, and like to be rewarded in kind.
The RIAA would rather have no music industry as opposed to a music industry where they don't control their own profits.
This is part and parcel to the monopoly mindset. Recall the AT&T fought its breakup tooth and nail, despite the fact that now, as one competitor among many in an industry that has grown by orders of magnitude due to competition, they make vastly more money than they did as a monopolist, and despite the fact that many, many economists and analysts were predicting exactly this behavior.
Microsoft is another example: with Palladium and DRM they are flirting with the very real risk of making their entire product ("the PC" in most people's minds) so crippled and singularly unattractive to consumers that it will go the way of DAT tape (not extinct like the original DivX pay-per-view DVD scheme, but relegated solely to professional use). They lock out GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and anyone else who might wish to compete on the Intel/AMD platform and lock in their monopoly, only to kill the feature that made the Intel platform appealing over the Apple, Atari, etc. platforms, despite the other's superior software and (in many cases, at the time) hardware: the apparent openness and competition that existed on the IBM compatible side of the fence. Once that is gone, all Apple has to do is continue business as is... for their hardware will dual boot GNU/Linux, does now (for the most part, goofy video connection cables notwithstanding) provide as much openness as Intel and, with the advent of Palladium, soon to be much more openness.
Suddenly the equation shifts, and Microsoft becomes a legacy providor on a closed platform no one wants to stay with. They get the 100% market share they so desire, in a rapidly shrinking market. The odd thing is, the cartel oligopolist and the monopolist prefer this to outright competition, even though they stand to make so much more money in a vastly larger competative marketplace!
The recording industry is no different. In an industry saddled with incompetent people at so many levels, and the fear of competition that incompetence breeds (remember how poor AT&T service could be, back in the monopoly days, or how poor SBC Ameritech service remains?), they would rather cling to 100% of a tiny (and shrinking) market they control, than face the uncertainty of having to compete on their merits, even in a market place orders of magnitude larger, where even despite their incompetence they would likely earn vastly more money.
It is a very odd mentality, but one that is well documented and recurrs over and over again in the industrialized world, and is arguably one of the best arguments for why monopolies should be illegal, and not merely tolerated and "guarded against" should abuses arise (which doesn't happen when the government chooses to willfully ignore its duty under the law *cough* Baby Bush's DOJ *cough* anyway).
But nothing compared to the lots and lots of books created after the existence of copyright laws.
When copyright was created, the number of published books plummeted to merely a third of their former diversity. That is a clear situation where one can compare apples to apples: the current state of the artistic environment immediately before, and after, copyrights were imposed.
Anything else is extraordinarilly disingenuous, ignoring the effects of a geometric climb in population, deployment of new and more effecient publishing technologies, and so forth, which are orthogonal to the effects of copyright.
Indeed, later increases in published material have more to do with increases in human population and deployment of technology than it does with copyright, and even those increases are dwarfed by the amount of derivative 'fan fiction' and unpublished works that have been created with no desire for profit whatsoever (many of which are technically illegal under current copyright law, as is, by the way, having a few friends over to watch a movie).
There are all kinds of alternatives to the absurd situation we have now, in which cartels dominate entire artforms by leveraging a system of government entitlement monopolies designed to favor publishers over artists, and both over the rest of society. These alternatives include tax incentives, small punitive taxes on anauthorized works with some or all of the proceeds going back to the orignial creater, etc. and require neither monopoly entitlements nor wealthy patronage.
Copyrights in the digital age must be reformed. To enforce the kinds of entitlement monopolies publishers have enjoyed since the British Crown created the first publishing cartel in the 15th century will require legislation so draconian as to make the former communist eastern block appear liberal in comparison, governance equipment in every home, office, car, and every portable electronic device that both monitors and reports a user's data usage habits, and a crippling of new emergent technologies that would have made any luddite of the 19th century, and every buggy whip manufacturer of the early 20th, proud.
Indeed, that is precisely what Disney and others are advocating, to which the only sane response of anyone who values any of the freedoms our forfathers died to create and protect must answer: if the choice given is one between the artists and publisher's profitability, and everyone elses privacy and individual liberties, then the artists will have to go out and get day jobs.
Of course, that false dichotomy is one Disney et. al. presents because they do not wish to see copyright reform, and would rather trample upon our privacy and liberty rather than adjust their business models to a new technology. In truth artists could make a perfectly fine living in an environment where they were not granted exclusive monopoly entitlements... indeed, they would likely benefit greatly from it. The only people who would suffer would be publishers, but with the internet, publishers should rightfully be relegated to the role of providing a paid service to artists (and competing with one another to do so), rather than the robber barrons of culture they have been allowed to become for the several centuries.
He probably uses apache, although he could be using any one of several free webservers, some of which are in fact GPLed.
Either you're an idiot or you're trolling. There is no in between. Personally, I think you're an idiot.
It is a pity you make such a good point about the diversity of free software licenses available, then ruin it with that sort of inane flamage.
First, he may or may not be trolling. I suspect probably not (but I could be wrong)... his comment appears to be a more naive equation of Free Software==GPL, which of course is mistaken, as you correctly point out. Free software can be public domain, it can be BSD licensed, it can be Artistically licensed, it can be apache licensed, it can be LGPLed, indeed, it can be licensed under any number of such licenses.
Second, to say there is no in between is foolish. Almost as foolish as Dubya's "your with us or you're with the terrorists," which the Iranians quite correctly rebutted with "we are neither with you, nor are we with the terrorists, and you sir are a pathetic simpleton" (a nuance obviuosly lost on our current regime). There is a huge middle ground... people often say provactive things in making very valid points.
Finally, he is hardly an idiot. Naive in equating the GPL with free software, but had his comment replaced the term GPL with "free software" it would have been very valid and on point. The core UNIX utilities and operating system need to be free software, unencumbered by constraints such as "no commercial use" (or the asinine "no use to violate human rights", where the definition of human rights varies from county to county, state to state, and very obviuosly nation to nation). On that point he is correct... he simply needs to educate himself on the nuances of free software licenses, and the difference between free software and the GPL, which is merely a subset thereof. Hardly a sign of idiocy, merely a sign of ignorance, a condition that is easily corrected.
Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?
I find whenever I am coding that it is a profoundly creative process, and while it may not always be poetry, it often is very akin to writing prose (as I have done). Indeed, in at least one case code is literally poetry, in an inspired implimentation of DeCSS as haiku:
You are correct in part: coding also has very substantive aspects of engineering to it. You are incorrect to differentiate it all too greatly from architecture IMHO. Coding is actually very, very similiar to architecture: a blending of art and engineering in the creation of an edifice that is expected to be both beautiful and functional.
You are wrong to assert some sort of "universal" agreement on what is and is not good code. My experience (admittedly only 15 years or so) is that there are many disagreements amongst professionals on these very points. Indeed, just like architects and artists of one school or another do tend to agree on what is "good" and what is "not", so to with programmers, and so too are there different schools which disagree with one another's aesthetics and argue vehemently amongst themselves as to what does, and does not, constitute good code.
He has 4000 years of history backing up his argument that Christendom wasn't a good thing for western culture at all. In fact, it led to the longest dark age in recorded history (something you westerner's seem to not notice about your own history).
That is an interesting point. The west only emerged as a leader in technology and its secondary effects, such as military strength, after the secularization of its governments. England for example placed the Church of England beneath the royal government, a reversal of the status quo under Catholic rule in the rest of Europe at the time. The US went further, completely separating church and state altogether.
The success of the west, after having languished under a thousand year dark age and fifteen hundred years of papal rule, is a testament to the power and effectiveness of secular government, separation of church and state, widespread public non-religious education, and widespread application of the scientific method.
China, which for all of its faults, has been doing largely the same for the last couple of decades, is suddenly sprinting to the fore. It will be interesting to see to what degree India can disentangle itself from its own religious dogma, separate church and state (in fact, not merely on paper), and do likewise. India has the added advantage of democracy, but has the disadvantage of still having religious dogma be a large part of its political and social life...nevertheless I am quite optomistic at the direction India is taking overall as well.
Meanwhile, here in the US we are embracing religious zeal and dogma as never berfore, with the religious right doing all it can to blurr the distinction between church and state and insinuate itself into our educational system and our political institutions. It would not surprise me at all to see a no-longer secular US languishing far behind a secular Europe, a secular China, and a (mostly) secular India in the next 30-50 years. If the Islamic world ever learns this important lesson and shakes off the shackles of its own religious dogma, they too will likely sprint right past us. A secular middle east would become an intellectual and scientific force to be reckoned with, which in turn leads to less fettered technological progress, military strength, etc.... for the first time in 250 years.
At which point the self-corrective nature of democarcy begins to emerge as a more critical component for long-term stability, as it did with the highly successful USSR (in moving an impoverished, agrarian society into the 20th century and making it a super-power) vs. the vastly more successful USA (which did the same, over a slightly longer period of time, but was able to sustain it much longer through a self-correcting political process that reigned in the excesses of capitalism (c.f. anti-trust legislation, anti-child labor acts, etc.) and corrected many historical injustices, while similar issues in the authoritarian east which could have been addressed (communism could have been made to work as capitalsim was, had its own dichotomies been addressed through legislative regulation in the same manner that capitalism's dichotomies were, in a democratic rather than authoritarian context) were not even considered by the authoritarian regimes until far too late.
You seem to be missing an important part of how cabbies make money, i.e., tipping. A cabbie who has the benefit of nice music may make a modest amount more than a cabbie who doesn't, by virtue of tips. A cabbie who asks you what station or genre of music you want to listen to may make even more.
Did you just miss this, are you intentionally ignoring it because it doesn't support your position, or are you one of those jerks who always stiffs the poor sap who's driving the cab 16 hours a day to feed the family?
I have friends who have driven cabs here in Chicago while getting their businesses off the ground and you couldn't be more correct. Letting the passengers choose their genre of music brings in significantly more tips than inflicting upon them silence or, worse, whatever it is you happen to be listening to. Why you were moderated down is beyond me (the moderator in question needs to put the crack pipe down and learn to think coherently). In any event, I have a +1 so hopefully those browsing at +2 will see my quote of your post despite the aforementioned idiots.
(Don't mod me up, mod the insightful parent post back up to where it belongs.)
Any history buff can tell you just how far a few, determined, idealistic men can go in changing history. Someday I may tell you how 13 men took on an Empire, and altared history (for the better), forever, 2000 years ago.
Actually, they took a multicultural, multiethnic, for the most part religiously tolerant (except of the xians) empire and turned it into a twelve hundred year reign of terror that swept a continent and resulted in a dark age that lasted until well into the renaissance. Hardly an improvement over the thousand years or so of enlightened and gradually progressing civilization that came before it... indeed, quite the opposite, and a cultural trauma the west has yet to fully recover from even today.
But the point you make remains... a few determined people can and do change history. sometimes for the good, sometimes, as in this case, for the worse. Either way, for good or ill, a few determined people can and do have a significant impact on the course of history, civilization, and perhaps even our very evolution as a species.
To me this sounds like they simply needed to revamp their whole setup to start with, be it with 3 windows/Mac/*nix servers.
That sounds all very even handed, but no one switches there entire infrastructure from one platform to another simply to "reorganize." If a company goes through the expense and time to switch platforms, they are doing so because of a measurable advantage (and enlightened staff savvy enough to recognize and take those advantages), namely in this case:
Lower licensing cost
Lower TCO (less manhours for same productivity)
Added simplicity in management and deployment
Freedom from having one's vendor yank one's chain (this is probably the most important aspect, and advantage of free software over proprietary equivelents)
Again this sounds like saving from a reorg not an OS switch. They don't mention why they didn't choose windows when they reduced their server farm. It's a misleading statement that makes you think _only_ *nix allowed them to reduce their server numbers.
It isn't misleading at all, and while it may be as easy to manage 3 Windows servers as it is 3 Unix servers, it is vastly more easy to manage 300 Unix servers than it is 300 Windows servers, and infinitely easier to manage 3,000 Unix workstations than it is 3,000 Windows workstations. The difference in manhours required, the advantages of scripting and automation over Windows GUI admin designs, etc. are well and thoroughly documented (and painfully obvious to anyone required to manage both).
They chose to move to GNU/Linux for several reasons, among those cited are cost and easier management (unequivocably true, regardless of the disinformation eminating from Redmond). No company does this lightly, and the move was almost certainly decided based entirely on the merits (punctuated by the fact that such a decision likely ran counter to political corporate mindset, which means the merits not only had to be present, they had to be exceptionally compelling).
This bring up a question I've asked before and no one seems to have a conclusive answer for. Technically, by the GPL rules, anyone who gets the binary has to be able to get the source. Now the DoD employees are certainly getting the binary, so they should have access to the source as well, correct? And if they have access to the source, the GPL gives them full legal rights to redistribute it as they want, correct?
The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman have both made this very, very clear.
Software kept within an organization is not considered to have been distributed. There is a very precise definitions of what distributed means, which the GPL, the FSF, etc. have made very clear. You can use as much GPLed code as you like with your in-house software, and as long as that software stays in-house it is not being distributed, and you are under no obligation to provide a single line of sourcecode to anyone. This has been made explicity clear by RMS and others.
Now, if you distribute the software outside of your organization, then you are obligated to provide the source code to that other organization.
So yes, the Army giving the Navy software would have to give them source code (and if the Navy wanted to give it to Joe Blow, the Army couldn't stop them). But having the source code distributed from Army Headquarters in the Pentagon to GI Jane in the field does not constitute distribution outside of the organization, and there is no obligation to either give Jane the code, nor to allow her to distribute it outside of the organization (in this case, the US military).
It runs on Irix, that is true. It also runs on GNU/Linux.
"We're making pretty significant steps into Linux-based workstations. They now appear to be becoming stable enough to be a viable alternative in both the 2D and 3D space"... Weta had just taken delivery of 25 Linux workstations from IBM and Labrie reported that IBM and Hewlett Packard were the frontrunners for additional Linux workstation upgrades.
And, from your own quote:
From the beginning of preproduction, Weta Digital has also used the IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations to write extensions to Maya and create proprietary technology. This technology includes Massive, a custom-built crowd animation or "artificial ecology" system developed on IRIX and now ported to Linux that draws from a huge database of motion-capture data. [emphesis mine]
"Ported. As in past tense. As in done. Based on that quote alone, your assertion of it "being ported" (implying an ongoing, unfinished process) is at odds with what SGI and others are saying (that the process is in fact finished), and with other technical articles on WETA and Massive that appear to indicate it is, in fact, running and being rendered on GNU/Linux systems. It is quite possible they are also rendering in Irix workstations, although the only article I found specifying the hardware mentioned that they had purchased "Silicon Graphics Octane and dual-processor 330 and 230 series Linux workstations." Unless the reporter parsed their English incorrectly (or got their facts wrong) it would appear that the massive rendering is being performed on GNU/Linux boxes (both SGI and generic intel hardware).
If that is wrong, and you can provide a citation indicating that, I would be greatful (and more than happy to eat my own words).
From another post [not yours!] which I'll reply to here, as this reply, and indeed yours as well, debunks rather thoroughly:
the only free software advantage here is that its free. if youre running custom software on a render farm, the OS isnt providing anything anyway.
To the claim that the operating system contributes nothing to the process, much less the system libraries (e.g. libc, etc.) I can only shake my head at the state of CS education today, or the quality of people claiming expertise in the field (again, not your or your post, but another in this thread which the above quotes debunk).
The OS, whether it is Irix, FreeBSD, or GNU/Linux, contributes a great deal to the system and its capabilities, be it the clustering technology, the underlying system utilities, capabilities, and stability, the system libraries to which the applications are linked, or simply the raw speed of the operating system (in which GNU/Linux for example clobbers every Microsoft offering there is), which is certainly a non-neglibable concern in such film projects. Given that the operating system is essentially the foundation upon which all else is built, I can only shake my head that there are people reading slashdot, and believing themselves to be technically savvy, who would assert something so fundamentally wrong and trivially falsifiable as "the free software (in this case the OS) ins't providing anything." Indeed, in addition to the examples (performance, system libraries, system services, stability, clustering infrastructure, filesystem access [probably SGI's excellent XFS], security, and speed), there is the counter example of Microsoft Windows itself, whose contribution to the instability and overall flakeyness of services which rely on Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2k, etc., be it in terms of interoperability with other standards compliant software, security, or overall stability, is certainly non-zero. Negative, yes (and notoriously so), but, like any other operating system and platform upon which user space software runs, most emphatically non-zero and non-neglibable.
Too badfor DMCA but its a fact, the origianl aguments were NEVER about DMCA they were about theft of XING key using a debugger violating the click-wrap license.
Click wrap licenses only have validity in states which have passed UCITA (some hick southern state and one of the tiny New England ones, if I recall correctly)... nowhere else is the act of clicking on a button, or unwrapping celephane packaging, considered the same as signing a contract and agreeing to additional limitations on one's freedom to use their property above and beyond copyright, which is what clickwarp licenses are all about.
Furthermore, no one took the XING key away from XING (perhaps the DVD-CSS folks did, but if so, then it was they, not the LiViD folks, who committed theft), at most they copied it (and it appears they copied it legally, irrespective of what an unenforcable clickwrap license might claim).
There was no "theft" of the XING key ever involved, and it would behoove you to stop using Copyright and Media Cartelspeak when discussing these issues if you have any interest in maintaining your ability to think about any of these issues in a clear and unbiased fashion.
Copyright violation is not theft. Reverse engineering software you own legally to see how it works is not theft. Uncovering someone's trade secrets using the data they have provided you (such as an encryption key) is not theft.
Some of these things are illegal, particularly since the corrupt imbecels in congress passed the woefully misguided DMCA, but none of them are theft, either under the law, or according to any mainstream, non-Cartel definition of the word.
In the star wars episode 1 big battle, it looked like a bunch of CGI fighting more CGI. Granted part were robots, but they all looked robotic. I felt nothing, and it was due to the obvious cgi and actions.
Did you feel anything in the opening sequence of the Fellowship of the Ring, at the battle where Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand? If so, that would confirm your evaluation of massive (at least for yourself), and would quite frankly agree with mine.
OTOH Star Wars I and II were without feeling for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the computer animation and special effects, and everything to do with terrible writing, mediocre directing, and wooden delivery... something I doubt any of the LOTR movies suffer from, but I digress.:-)
RTFA. Massive isn't open-source and their is no mention of what hardware they used either.
The software is running on a cluster of GNU/Linux boxes. That is what he is likely referring to, and while this article may make no reference to the operating system, device drivers, libraries, and compilers used both to compile Massive itself, and to support the cluster upon which its renders run, it is well documented in any number of places, findable by google, and such common knowledge by most who read slashdot that he probably didn't feel the need to elucidate further.
The growth of GNU/Linux in Hollywood, the financial industry (in which I work), and any number of other areas of serious computational endeavor is indeed a very big victory for free software and open source, and a glaring black eye for the likes of Microsoft. One of free software's strongest advantages is the way it facilitates rapid development, maintenance, and long term stability of in-house software (by avoiding things like coerced upgrades, arbitrarilly moving API targets, shoddy infrastructure, poor security, and other such costly and detrimental things that Microsoft & Co. are so well known for).
I really wish it were possible to get the CryptoAPI merged into the full kernel. I've been compiling kernels without problems since the 1.2 series, but CryptoAPI patches are more convoluted than any other patch series I've ever tried.
Given that you're no stranger to either GNU/Linux or compiling the Linux kernel, you may want to take a look at the source-based Gentoo distribution. Aside from making download and compilation from the author's tarballs trivial via the portage system (emerge rsync ; emerge [packagename]), the gentoo-sources kernel has numerous additional patches, including the crypto-api patches.
emerge rsync ; emerge gentoo-sources, followed by the usual cd/usr/src/linux; make menuconfig, etc. will bet you the Crypto API patch, as well as the low latency/preempt patches, grsecurity patches, and so on. All nicely applied already, and ready for you to compile and use.
Perhaps not as nice as if they'd made it into the feature freeze for 2.6, but a lot easier than the process you describe.
I too am reading Wolfram's book, and it is excellent (and very interesting). But Wolfram takes a great deal of credit which IMHO ought to go to Fredkin, who originally proposed and explored this idea.
No slight against Wolfram intended, but we ought to give some credit where it is due.
On the other hand, if a scientist doesn't patent an idea, a corporation surely will.
Not necessarilly, and even if it were true, if the scientist publishes first, that is prior art and the corporate patent won't hold up in court. Indeed, if the USPTO were not being criminally negligent in its fudiciary duties under the constitution, it wouldn't even grant the patent in such a case.
A lot of internet information is crap... So why would you want to preserve all of it? Why not just get the good stuff and maybe he won't need so many comptuers.
And of course, you're going to decide what is "good" and what "isn't?" He is providing the resource for, among other things, scholarly researchers. Of what use is the data if it has been hand edited according to one person's aesthetics or anothers?
Indeed, your comment reminds me of one that was heard quite often, shortly before beautiful and irreplacable old buildings were razed to make way for a new strip mall, or, in downtown Chicago, a couple of new government buildings whose architectural style is best described as "Federal Drab." Preserving as much as possible is a good thing, because none of us can tell what will be valuable, and what will not, in another 20 or 30 years, and no one's aesthetic should be dictating such a decision to entire generations to come.
Gentoos portage of the Xfree doesnt support the 9700 yet. (Thou I saw 4.2.99-3 was out last week, which might) I know the CVS version of Xfree did find my 9700 with --configure.
I'm considering a 9700-pro.
Do you find cvs-xfree to provide adeqaute 2d performance / support?
Have you tried ATI's new binary drivers (for good 3d support) and if so, how did you find them?
1. A package format is expected to provide more than a mere compressed archive of files. Tar is an _archive_ format, not a _package_ format. I'd ask you kindly not to post a response to this comment until you understand the difference.
Translation: "I disagree with you, therefor you are an ignorant fuck. Please shut up until such a time as you agree, both with my definitions and my conclusions."
The difference between an archive and a package is one of semantics. A tarball can easilly contain all of the information necessary for a package to be built, indeed, most source tarballs these days do exactly that.
You want to define a standard for that, go right ahead. But do not in the process favor one distribution over another, or chuck out a perfectly good archival approach that is a widely adopted, cross-platform standard for one that is obfuscated, inferior, less widely adopted, and less generic.
Such as standard could be as easy as a parsable, human readable text file "dependencies.txt" in the top tarball directory, for example. There are any number of solutions to that requirement, almost all of which are more elegant than RPMs (or.debs, or what have you).
Furthermore, not all distributions use binaries. Any standard that makes an assumption that all od (as LSB to some extent does, by adopting RPM) is inherently inadequate and broken. Indeed, acceptance of such a standard would likely inhibit a fair degree of development and progress in the GNU/Linux community, particularly when it comes to exploring less traditional methods of package organization, handling, and distribution.
For example, many distributions, such as Gentoo and Source Mage, use source and build the installation dynamically. Debian apt-get source is another such example. All of these have the advantage of having a very short time-to-market between the developers release of a package (generally in tar format... are you going to take issue and declare that none of those developers release packages, merely archives?) and its availability to the distribution user, generally much quicker than binary equivelents (though Mandrake Cooker, as another pointed out, is fairly good at keeping current, albeit at a stability cost the source based distros don't suffer from). Other advantages include a 20-30% speed improvement from compiling the system optimized for the hardware it will run on, added stability by eliminating the sort of subtle incompatabilities binaries often suffer from when compiled against a slightly different library revision, and so on.
In short, there are compelling reasons why adding a binary package format, particularly one such as RPM, will not have a beneficial affect for Linux as a whole (though it certainly does benefit Red Hat).
Using incompatability between rpm's produced by different distros as an argument against rpm as the LSB standard package format is really back-asswards, given that the one of the main points of the LSB is to _ensure_ distribution interoperability.
If that is indeed its purpose (and I don't dispute that), then it is already a miserable failure. Suse and Redhat RPMs that are LSB compliant still break from time to time when used on the other platform, so clearly LSB compliance alone isn't enough to guarantee compatability anyway.
An rpm made in adherence to the LSB spec will work on any LSB-compliant distribution.
That may be the claim, but as noted above, it simply isn't true. LSB compliant RPMs still fail to be compatible across distributions. By including RPM in the standard they've created a Red Hat specific loop everyone is expected to jump through, yet the dubious benefits it purports to offer remain unrealized, indeed, are quite possibly unattainable without hamstringing diversity to the point where all distros are required to be One Distro for compliance, a la the woefully misguided "United Linux" initiative.
RPMs are ugly, unwieldly, distribution specific, and an unnecessary complication that has no place in the LSB standard. Were it not for politics and certain entities wielding undue influence on the standards body in question, it never would have been included, and the LSB standard would have been better for it (and much more widely adopted).
Your kneejerk reaction to his decision to patent his idea is a most unfortunate and immature one. First of all, a biotech company is not an IT company or an internet startup. You can't start them in your garage. You need lots of expensive equipment and expensive highly trained professionals to work with it in the labs. You must also run testing trials, many of them which are also expensive. All of this takes money. Not millions, but billions.
Your kneejerk reaction to defend the privatization and monopolization of human knowledge is unfortunate. Government entitlements in general are antithetical to free markets, government monopoly entitlements particularly so.
1) Biotech and pharma companies routinely exaggerate their R&D costs, often by orders of magnitude, rolling standard corporate costs of doing business into the sum total.
2) most bio and pharma research is done with a mixture of private and public capital, yet those donating money to (e.g.) AIDS research are not given a portion of the "ownership" once the patent is granted. Indeed, that same patent prohibits, by force of a government gun, the donator from persuing research along the very same lines his or her donation helped to initially fund.
3) Patents stifle research. This has been demonstrated historically time and time again. The Wright Brother's patent led to the United States falling a generation behind in aircraft technology, stifling improvements so much so that with the advent of World War I the US government, in an unprecedented move (and a tacit admission that patents do in fact stifle progress, no surprise since they are antithetical to competition which unlike patents actually does promote progress) seized their patent, opened it up to all comers to promote competition, and granted the Wright Brothers an arbitrary 1% royalty so that the technology would be improved and we'd have a fighting chance against the much more advanced German aircraft (whose builders had not been hamstrung by such patents).
More recently, several lines of research into potential cures for breast cancer and AIDS have been stopped, in response to Cease and Desist letters sent by patent holders very similiar to the person you so blindly laud.
Your anti-slashot ranting and raving aside, monopolies are antithetical to competition, antithetical to free markets, and antithetical to progress. Yes, they enrich the inventor (sometimes, often they do not, they enrich instead the inventor's employer), but even in the best case (such as the Wright Brother's invention of the airplane, or perhaps this case), all further improvements on the technology will only come from a very limited group: the patent holder themself, or those few they license to use the patent. Vast numbers of researchers are thus excluded, and a vast number of improvements essentially left unexplored for at least 20 years.
With fundamental science like this, that's a lot of research, a lot of unrealized cures or treatments, and a lot of dead people as a result. Not in Fantastic Land, in the real, hard world.
There are other methods to funding research besides granting government entitlements to 20-year monopolies, and almost all of them are vastly better than the patent system we are employing today.
Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.
The singularity is neither good nor bad, merely unpredictable. That having been said, I don't believe there is or ever will be a Vinge style singularity.
Or, put another way, we've been through a dozen singuarlities already. Do you think the future as it played out among the ancient Egyptians was comprehensible, imaginable to the hunter-gatherers five thousand years earlier? Was human flight (with anything other than angel's wings) imaginable to the 9th century serfs in [insert your favorite Christian Country here]? And while Jules Verne was able to imagine submarines and rockets, certainly computers, much less the virtual, digital lives we lead on them, were incomprehensible not only to him, but to our own parents a scant thirty years ago.
Was there any magical, discontinuity that happened as a result?
No, because there is no singularity, there never was a singularity, and there never will be a singularity. An airplane or a ship doesn't suddenly drop off the edge of the earth or experience some other weird discontinuity merely because it flies or sales over the horizon... it simply, gradually and incrementally, sees what is beyond the horizon and eventually goes there, seeing and experiencing what we who have not gone there cannot.
So too with the so-called technological singularity. It is merely a horizon beyond which we cannot see from our current vantage point. When we reach this horizon (and cross it) there won't be some sudden, miraculous (or disasterous) break, there will simply be yet another incremental, continuious change in our technology and its impact on our lives.
I live farther up the exponential curve of human knowledge and technology than most... running an operating system and distribution (Gentoo) which has upgraded packages available every single day. I can get up each morning, to an 'emerge rsync ; emerge -up world ; emerge -u world' and perform the kind of software upgrades, each and every day, that used to happen once every couple of years, then once every few months, now, perhaps, for those who think they're really leading edge in the proprietary world, every few weeks. I do it every day, and I'm sure a time will come when one could do such every hour, every minute, every second, and, someday, probably every microsecond.
So what? When that time comes, our ability to grasp and keep up with these changes, via tools (such as portage) or enhancements to our own minds, or what have you, will keep pace. The changes will come ever faster, but they will remain incremental, continuous changes, not dramatic, sudden, event-horizon style discontinuities or big technological division-by-zeros that the messianic and hysterical alike imagine.
The mere fact that many of these changes are beyond our current technological horizon, are beyond our current imagination and ability to concieve, doesn't make them in any way mysterious, miraculous, dangerous, or magical... and this sort of fearmongering by luddites such as Bill Joy (yes, I know how me made his fortune... but remember, those who made yesterdays technologies are often the worst luddites against tommorow's) is both disingenuous and destructive to our society, our culture, and our quest for knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with Robert Heinlein:
;-)
"An armed society is a polite society."
It would be nice if more people were polite, wouldn't it?
These issues are vastly more complex than Heinlein's little one-shot sound bites would lead one to believe (as much as I thoroughly enjoyed Time Enough for Love and yearned to live in that world as I was growing up, entire chapters are little more than clever sound bites with nothing to support their veracity. It is science fiction, and good science fiction at that, but the key word here is "fiction.")
Yes, I would like to see people be more polite, but there are other means than threat of death by firearms to encourage politeness in a society. Furthermore, armed societies such as Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, Serbia, Chechnia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, etc. are hardly models of polite society, so I think we can dismiss the veracity of Heinlein's little quipp simply by taking a look around our own, contemporary, and very real world.
Plus, isn't an armed citizenry quite a deterrent for casual crime...?
It may well be (assuming citizens are allowed to "pack" as well as "own," something they are not in many parts of the USA), but it is also quite a facilitator for crimes of "passion", such as road rage, momentary madness stemming from anger, etc.
How do the two balance out? I don't know. Like the original person posting the question, I would like very much to see a dispassionate study done on these issues, and let the chips fall where they may.
My biases have been pro gun control (after living in Europe for many years and growing used to the relatively low crime rates there), anti-gun control (after seeing the atrocities committed by troups upon unarmed civilians in Kosovo, Bosnia, etc. a few hundred short kilometers from where I had lived in such peace), to now a very mixed perception, and a conclusion that I simply do not know which side of the argument is more correct than the other, and can recognize that both sides have compelling aspects to their argument.
So I too would like to see an unbiased study, and contrary to many here, I think such a study is emminently possible, if one can gather knowledgable people with the professional and scientific ethic to place good science above their own personal political and social opinions. Such people do exist, and while they may have become more rare in this age of political conformity (from both the right and the left), there are still plenty around to conduct such a study, if the need and interest should ever reach the necessary threshold.
Yes, and less jobs. If every city were like Largo, the IT labor market would be even more horrible than it is now.
... MSCEs can retrain themselves, or find a different line of work.
Only for MSCEs. Does anybody really care about them anyway?
Seriously, the wages of competent admins will go up, the wages of marginal admins, or admins with skill sets inappropriate to a free software/open source and/or *NIX environment will plummet. So what? It isn't the job of government to employ, it is the job of government to get the best value per dollar for each tax dollar spent, and using a free platform such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD is clearly head and shoulders above Microsoft's proprietary platform in providing exactly that value.
c'est la vie
I also was impressed that they spend less than half the money other towns do on their IT. Of course, from the sysadmin POV that's bad as it means they aren't paid much. But that's the price of freedom, I guess.
One of the real plusses of being UNIX savvy in general, and GNU/Linux/free software/open source savvy in particular, is that one actually often earns a better living than their Microsoftoid equivelents. Why? Because paying one knowledgable person who, in a GNU/Linux, *BSD, or *NIX shop can do the work that requires three or four MSCE's (assuming a modicum of competence on the MSCE's part, an assumption that is, as many here have pointed out repeatedly, is not one that is safe to make), 1.5 - 2 times the salary still translates into a tremendous human resources savings, and brings with it the added benefits of expertise, lower turnover, and attention to detail (and research) pointed out in this article.
If you are saving money because your staffing requirements are lower (in raw numbers of bodies), your licensing costs are lower, and your TCO costs are lower (all nearly always true with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD vs. Microsoft), you can pay a premium for really good people and have the benefits that brings along with tremendous savings.
Which is great for everyone, except shoddy admins who probably should find another line of work anyway. It is certainly great for those of us who know what we are doing and take pride in doing quality work for our clients/employers, and like to be rewarded in kind.
The RIAA would rather have no music industry as opposed to a music industry where they don't control their own profits.
... for their hardware will dual boot GNU/Linux, does now (for the most part, goofy video connection cables notwithstanding) provide as much openness as Intel and, with the advent of Palladium, soon to be much more openness.
This is part and parcel to the monopoly mindset. Recall the AT&T fought its breakup tooth and nail, despite the fact that now, as one competitor among many in an industry that has grown by orders of magnitude due to competition, they make vastly more money than they did as a monopolist, and despite the fact that many, many economists and analysts were predicting exactly this behavior.
Microsoft is another example: with Palladium and DRM they are flirting with the very real risk of making their entire product ("the PC" in most people's minds) so crippled and singularly unattractive to consumers that it will go the way of DAT tape (not extinct like the original DivX pay-per-view DVD scheme, but relegated solely to professional use). They lock out GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and anyone else who might wish to compete on the Intel/AMD platform and lock in their monopoly, only to kill the feature that made the Intel platform appealing over the Apple, Atari, etc. platforms, despite the other's superior software and (in many cases, at the time) hardware: the apparent openness and competition that existed on the IBM compatible side of the fence. Once that is gone, all Apple has to do is continue business as is
Suddenly the equation shifts, and Microsoft becomes a legacy providor on a closed platform no one wants to stay with. They get the 100% market share they so desire, in a rapidly shrinking market. The odd thing is, the cartel oligopolist and the monopolist prefer this to outright competition, even though they stand to make so much more money in a vastly larger competative marketplace!
The recording industry is no different. In an industry saddled with incompetent people at so many levels, and the fear of competition that incompetence breeds (remember how poor AT&T service could be, back in the monopoly days, or how poor SBC Ameritech service remains?), they would rather cling to 100% of a tiny (and shrinking) market they control, than face the uncertainty of having to compete on their merits, even in a market place orders of magnitude larger, where even despite their incompetence they would likely earn vastly more money.
It is a very odd mentality, but one that is well documented and recurrs over and over again in the industrialized world, and is arguably one of the best arguments for why monopolies should be illegal, and not merely tolerated and "guarded against" should abuses arise (which doesn't happen when the government chooses to willfully ignore its duty under the law *cough* Baby Bush's DOJ *cough* anyway).
But nothing compared to the lots and lots of books created after the existence of copyright laws.
... indeed, they would likely benefit greatly from it. The only people who would suffer would be publishers, but with the internet, publishers should rightfully be relegated to the role of providing a paid service to artists (and competing with one another to do so), rather than the robber barrons of culture they have been allowed to become for the several centuries.
When copyright was created, the number of published books plummeted to merely a third of their former diversity. That is a clear situation where one can compare apples to apples: the current state of the artistic environment immediately before, and after, copyrights were imposed.
Anything else is extraordinarilly disingenuous, ignoring the effects of a geometric climb in population, deployment of new and more effecient publishing technologies, and so forth, which are orthogonal to the effects of copyright.
Indeed, later increases in published material have more to do with increases in human population and deployment of technology than it does with copyright, and even those increases are dwarfed by the amount of derivative 'fan fiction' and unpublished works that have been created with no desire for profit whatsoever (many of which are technically illegal under current copyright law, as is, by the way, having a few friends over to watch a movie).
There are all kinds of alternatives to the absurd situation we have now, in which cartels dominate entire artforms by leveraging a system of government entitlement monopolies designed to favor publishers over artists, and both over the rest of society. These alternatives include tax incentives, small punitive taxes on anauthorized works with some or all of the proceeds going back to the orignial creater, etc. and require neither monopoly entitlements nor wealthy patronage.
Copyrights in the digital age must be reformed. To enforce the kinds of entitlement monopolies publishers have enjoyed since the British Crown created the first publishing cartel in the 15th century will require legislation so draconian as to make the former communist eastern block appear liberal in comparison, governance equipment in every home, office, car, and every portable electronic device that both monitors and reports a user's data usage habits, and a crippling of new emergent technologies that would have made any luddite of the 19th century, and every buggy whip manufacturer of the early 20th, proud.
Indeed, that is precisely what Disney and others are advocating, to which the only sane response of anyone who values any of the freedoms our forfathers died to create and protect must answer: if the choice given is one between the artists and publisher's profitability, and everyone elses privacy and individual liberties, then the artists will have to go out and get day jobs.
Of course, that false dichotomy is one Disney et. al. presents because they do not wish to see copyright reform, and would rather trample upon our privacy and liberty rather than adjust their business models to a new technology. In truth artists could make a perfectly fine living in an environment where they were not granted exclusive monopoly entitlements
What do you use for webserving?
... his comment appears to be a more naive equation of Free Software==GPL, which of course is mistaken, as you correctly point out. Free software can be public domain, it can be BSD licensed, it can be Artistically licensed, it can be apache licensed, it can be LGPLed, indeed, it can be licensed under any number of such licenses.
... people often say provactive things in making very valid points.
... he simply needs to educate himself on the nuances of free software licenses, and the difference between free software and the GPL, which is merely a subset thereof. Hardly a sign of idiocy, merely a sign of ignorance, a condition that is easily corrected.
He probably uses apache, although he could be using any one of several free webservers, some of which are in fact GPLed.
Either you're an idiot or you're trolling. There is no in between. Personally, I think you're an idiot.
It is a pity you make such a good point about the diversity of free software licenses available, then ruin it with that sort of inane flamage.
First, he may or may not be trolling. I suspect probably not (but I could be wrong)
Second, to say there is no in between is foolish. Almost as foolish as Dubya's "your with us or you're with the terrorists," which the Iranians quite correctly rebutted with "we are neither with you, nor are we with the terrorists, and you sir are a pathetic simpleton" (a nuance obviuosly lost on our current regime). There is a huge middle ground
Finally, he is hardly an idiot. Naive in equating the GPL with free software, but had his comment replaced the term GPL with "free software" it would have been very valid and on point. The core UNIX utilities and operating system need to be free software, unencumbered by constraints such as "no commercial use" (or the asinine "no use to violate human rights", where the definition of human rights varies from county to county, state to state, and very obviuosly nation to nation). On that point he is correct
Sure, there's a creative aspect. But there's a creative aspect to the bridge-building example he describes. And while maybe on any given program you're working on only the 7th or 8th generation at most, almost any programming task that people deal with has been worked umpteen times - maybe not by them, but by someone. Let's face it, most programming is mundane, whether you work for Bank of America or Playboy, and involves working mostly the same old strategies and structures for slightly different ends. How creative can you get with bubble-sort or linked-lists, or which you've probably used tons of times before ?
- 12-2001.html for the rest ... slashdot's asinine lameness filter won't let me include it here. It concludes...
I find whenever I am coding that it is a profoundly creative process, and while it may not always be poetry, it often is very akin to writing prose (as I have done). Indeed, in at least one case code is literally poetry, in an inspired implimentation of DeCSS as haiku:
How to decrypt a
DVD: in haiku form.
(Thanks, Prof. D. S. T.)
see http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/wsj-04
Have mercy on me,
Lord, and lesser judges, and
on Jon Johansen.
You are correct in part: coding also has very substantive aspects of engineering to it. You are incorrect to differentiate it all too greatly from architecture IMHO. Coding is actually very, very similiar to architecture: a blending of art and engineering in the creation of an edifice that is expected to be both beautiful and functional.
You are wrong to assert some sort of "universal" agreement on what is and is not good code. My experience (admittedly only 15 years or so) is that there are many disagreements amongst professionals on these very points. Indeed, just like architects and artists of one school or another do tend to agree on what is "good" and what is "not", so to with programmers, and so too are there different schools which disagree with one another's aesthetics and argue vehemently amongst themselves as to what does, and does not, constitute good code.
He has 4000 years of history backing up his argument that Christendom wasn't a good thing for western culture at all. In fact, it led to the longest dark age in recorded history (something you westerner's seem to not notice about your own history).
... for the first time in 250 years.
That is an interesting point. The west only emerged as a leader in technology and its secondary effects, such as military strength, after the secularization of its governments. England for example placed the Church of England beneath the royal government, a reversal of the status quo under Catholic rule in the rest of Europe at the time. The US went further, completely separating church and state altogether.
The success of the west, after having languished under a thousand year dark age and fifteen hundred years of papal rule, is a testament to the power and effectiveness of secular government, separation of church and state, widespread public non-religious education, and widespread application of the scientific method.
China, which for all of its faults, has been doing largely the same for the last couple of decades, is suddenly sprinting to the fore. It will be interesting to see to what degree India can disentangle itself from its own religious dogma, separate church and state (in fact, not merely on paper), and do likewise. India has the added advantage of democracy, but has the disadvantage of still having religious dogma be a large part of its political and social life...nevertheless I am quite optomistic at the direction India is taking overall as well.
Meanwhile, here in the US we are embracing religious zeal and dogma as never berfore, with the religious right doing all it can to blurr the distinction between church and state and insinuate itself into our educational system and our political institutions. It would not surprise me at all to see a no-longer secular US languishing far behind a secular Europe, a secular China, and a (mostly) secular India in the next 30-50 years. If the Islamic world ever learns this important lesson and shakes off the shackles of its own religious dogma, they too will likely sprint right past us. A secular middle east would become an intellectual and scientific force to be reckoned with, which in turn leads to less fettered technological progress, military strength, etc.
At which point the self-corrective nature of democarcy begins to emerge as a more critical component for long-term stability, as it did with the highly successful USSR (in moving an impoverished, agrarian society into the 20th century and making it a super-power) vs. the vastly more successful USA (which did the same, over a slightly longer period of time, but was able to sustain it much longer through a self-correcting political process that reigned in the excesses of capitalism (c.f. anti-trust legislation, anti-child labor acts, etc.) and corrected many historical injustices, while similar issues in the authoritarian east which could have been addressed (communism could have been made to work as capitalsim was, had its own dichotomies been addressed through legislative regulation in the same manner that capitalism's dichotomies were, in a democratic rather than authoritarian context) were not even considered by the authoritarian regimes until far too late.
You seem to be missing an important part of how cabbies make money, i.e., tipping. A cabbie who has the benefit of nice music may make a modest amount more than a cabbie who doesn't, by virtue of tips. A cabbie who asks you what station or genre of music you want to listen to may make even more.
Did you just miss this, are you intentionally ignoring it because it doesn't support your position, or are you one of those jerks who always stiffs the poor sap who's driving the cab 16 hours a day to feed the family?
I have friends who have driven cabs here in Chicago while getting their businesses off the ground and you couldn't be more correct. Letting the passengers choose their genre of music brings in significantly more tips than inflicting upon them silence or, worse, whatever it is you happen to be listening to. Why you were moderated down is beyond me (the moderator in question needs to put the crack pipe down and learn to think coherently). In any event, I have a +1 so hopefully those browsing at +2 will see my quote of your post despite the aforementioned idiots.
(Don't mod me up, mod the insightful parent post back up to where it belongs.)
Any history buff can tell you just how far a few, determined, idealistic men can go in changing history. Someday I may tell you how 13 men took on an Empire, and altared history (for the better), forever, 2000 years ago.
... indeed, quite the opposite, and a cultural trauma the west has yet to fully recover from even today.
... a few determined people can and do change history. sometimes for the good, sometimes, as in this case, for the worse. Either way, for good or ill, a few determined people can and do have a significant impact on the course of history, civilization, and perhaps even our very evolution as a species.
Actually, they took a multicultural, multiethnic, for the most part religiously tolerant (except of the xians) empire and turned it into a twelve hundred year reign of terror that swept a continent and resulted in a dark age that lasted until well into the renaissance. Hardly an improvement over the thousand years or so of enlightened and gradually progressing civilization that came before it
But the point you make remains
That sounds all very even handed, but no one switches there entire infrastructure from one platform to another simply to "reorganize." If a company goes through the expense and time to switch platforms, they are doing so because of a measurable advantage (and enlightened staff savvy enough to recognize and take those advantages), namely in this case:
Again this sounds like saving from a reorg not an OS switch. They don't mention why they didn't choose windows when they reduced their server farm. It's a misleading statement that makes you think _only_ *nix allowed them to reduce their server numbers.
It isn't misleading at all, and while it may be as easy to manage 3 Windows servers as it is 3 Unix servers, it is vastly more easy to manage 300 Unix servers than it is 300 Windows servers, and infinitely easier to manage 3,000 Unix workstations than it is 3,000 Windows workstations. The difference in manhours required, the advantages of scripting and automation over Windows GUI admin designs, etc. are well and thoroughly documented (and painfully obvious to anyone required to manage both).
They chose to move to GNU/Linux for several reasons, among those cited are cost and easier management (unequivocably true, regardless of the disinformation eminating from Redmond). No company does this lightly, and the move was almost certainly decided based entirely on the merits (punctuated by the fact that such a decision likely ran counter to political corporate mindset, which means the merits not only had to be present, they had to be exceptionally compelling).
This bring up a question I've asked before and no one seems to have a conclusive answer for. Technically, by the GPL rules, anyone who gets the binary has to be able to get the source. Now the DoD employees are certainly getting the binary, so they should have access to the source as well, correct? And if they have access to the source, the GPL gives them full legal rights to redistribute it as they want, correct?
The Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman have both made this very, very clear.
Software kept within an organization is not considered to have been distributed. There is a very precise definitions of what distributed means, which the GPL, the FSF, etc. have made very clear. You can use as much GPLed code as you like with your in-house software, and as long as that software stays in-house it is not being distributed, and you are under no obligation to provide a single line of sourcecode to anyone. This has been made explicity clear by RMS and others.
Now, if you distribute the software outside of your organization, then you are obligated to provide the source code to that other organization.
So yes, the Army giving the Navy software would have to give them source code (and if the Navy wanted to give it to Joe Blow, the Army couldn't stop them). But having the source code distributed from Army Headquarters in the Pentagon to GI Jane in the field does not constitute distribution outside of the organization, and there is no obligation to either give Jane the code, nor to allow her to distribute it outside of the organization (in this case, the US military).
And, from your own quote:
From the beginning of preproduction, Weta Digital has also used the IRIX OS-based Octane visual workstations to write extensions to Maya and create proprietary technology. This technology includes Massive, a custom-built crowd animation or "artificial ecology" system developed on IRIX and now ported to Linux that draws from a huge database of motion-capture data. [emphesis mine]
"Ported. As in past tense. As in done. Based on that quote alone, your assertion of it "being ported" (implying an ongoing, unfinished process) is at odds with what SGI and others are saying (that the process is in fact finished), and with other technical articles on WETA and Massive that appear to indicate it is, in fact, running and being rendered on GNU/Linux systems. It is quite possible they are also rendering in Irix workstations, although the only article I found specifying the hardware mentioned that they had purchased "Silicon Graphics Octane and dual-processor 330 and 230 series Linux workstations." Unless the reporter parsed their English incorrectly (or got their facts wrong) it would appear that the massive rendering is being performed on GNU/Linux boxes (both SGI and generic intel hardware).
If that is wrong, and you can provide a citation indicating that, I would be greatful (and more than happy to eat my own words).
From another post [not yours!] which I'll reply to here, as this reply, and indeed yours as well, debunks rather thoroughly:
To the claim that the operating system contributes nothing to the process, much less the system libraries (e.g. libc, etc.) I can only shake my head at the state of CS education today, or the quality of people claiming expertise in the field (again, not your or your post, but another in this thread which the above quotes debunk).
The OS, whether it is Irix, FreeBSD, or GNU/Linux, contributes a great deal to the system and its capabilities, be it the clustering technology, the underlying system utilities, capabilities, and stability, the system libraries to which the applications are linked, or simply the raw speed of the operating system (in which GNU/Linux for example clobbers every Microsoft offering there is), which is certainly a non-neglibable concern in such film projects. Given that the operating system is essentially the foundation upon which all else is built, I can only shake my head that there are people reading slashdot, and believing themselves to be technically savvy, who would assert something so fundamentally wrong and trivially falsifiable as "the free software (in this case the OS) ins't providing anything." Indeed, in addition to the examples (performance, system libraries, system services, stability, clustering infrastructure, filesystem access [probably SGI's excellent XFS], security, and speed), there is the counter example of Microsoft Windows itself, whose contribution to the instability and overall flakeyness of services which rely on Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2k, etc., be it in terms of interoperability with other standards compliant software, security, or overall stability, is certainly non-zero. Negative, yes (and notoriously so), but, like any other operating system and platform upon which user space software runs, most emphatically non-zero and non-neglibable.
Too badfor DMCA but its a fact, the origianl aguments were NEVER about DMCA they were about theft of XING key using a debugger violating the click-wrap license.
... nowhere else is the act of clicking on a button, or unwrapping celephane packaging, considered the same as signing a contract and agreeing to additional limitations on one's freedom to use their property above and beyond copyright, which is what clickwarp licenses are all about.
Click wrap licenses only have validity in states which have passed UCITA (some hick southern state and one of the tiny New England ones, if I recall correctly)
Furthermore, no one took the XING key away from XING (perhaps the DVD-CSS folks did, but if so, then it was they, not the LiViD folks, who committed theft), at most they copied it (and it appears they copied it legally, irrespective of what an unenforcable clickwrap license might claim).
There was no "theft" of the XING key ever involved, and it would behoove you to stop using Copyright and Media Cartelspeak when discussing these issues if you have any interest in maintaining your ability to think about any of these issues in a clear and unbiased fashion.
Copyright violation is not theft. Reverse engineering software you own legally to see how it works is not theft. Uncovering someone's trade secrets using the data they have provided you (such as an encryption key) is not theft.
Some of these things are illegal, particularly since the corrupt imbecels in congress passed the woefully misguided DMCA, but none of them are theft, either under the law, or according to any mainstream, non-Cartel definition of the word.
In the star wars episode 1 big battle, it looked like a bunch of CGI fighting more CGI. Granted part were robots, but they all looked robotic. I felt nothing, and it was due to the obvious cgi and actions.
... something I doubt any of the LOTR movies suffer from, but I digress. :-)
Did you feel anything in the opening sequence of the Fellowship of the Ring, at the battle where Isildur cut the ring from Sauron's hand? If so, that would confirm your evaluation of massive (at least for yourself), and would quite frankly agree with mine.
OTOH Star Wars I and II were without feeling for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the computer animation and special effects, and everything to do with terrible writing, mediocre directing, and wooden delivery
RTFA. Massive isn't open-source and their is no mention of what hardware they used either.
The software is running on a cluster of GNU/Linux boxes. That is what he is likely referring to, and while this article may make no reference to the operating system, device drivers, libraries, and compilers used both to compile Massive itself, and to support the cluster upon which its renders run, it is well documented in any number of places, findable by google, and such common knowledge by most who read slashdot that he probably didn't feel the need to elucidate further.
The growth of GNU/Linux in Hollywood, the financial industry (in which I work), and any number of other areas of serious computational endeavor is indeed a very big victory for free software and open source, and a glaring black eye for the likes of Microsoft. One of free software's strongest advantages is the way it facilitates rapid development, maintenance, and long term stability of in-house software (by avoiding things like coerced upgrades, arbitrarilly moving API targets, shoddy infrastructure, poor security, and other such costly and detrimental things that Microsoft & Co. are so well known for).
I really wish it were possible to get the CryptoAPI merged into the full kernel. I've been compiling kernels without problems since the 1.2 series, but CryptoAPI patches are more convoluted than any other patch series I've ever tried.
/usr/src/linux; make menuconfig, etc. will bet you the Crypto API patch, as well as the low latency/preempt patches, grsecurity patches, and so on. All nicely applied already, and ready for you to compile and use.
Given that you're no stranger to either GNU/Linux or compiling the Linux kernel, you may want to take a look at the source-based Gentoo distribution. Aside from making download and compilation from the author's tarballs trivial via the portage system (emerge rsync ; emerge [packagename]), the gentoo-sources kernel has numerous additional patches, including the crypto-api patches.
emerge rsync ; emerge gentoo-sources, followed by the usual cd
Perhaps not as nice as if they'd made it into the feature freeze for 2.6, but a lot easier than the process you describe.
Im planning to play with it the binary drivers this weekend, also, I havnt tried Unreal yet on the ATI. I will post back with details later.
thanks, I appreciate it!
I too am reading Wolfram's book, and it is excellent (and very interesting). But Wolfram takes a great deal of credit which IMHO ought to go to Fredkin, who originally proposed and explored this idea.
No slight against Wolfram intended, but we ought to give some credit where it is due.
On the other hand, if a scientist doesn't patent an idea, a corporation surely will.
Not necessarilly, and even if it were true, if the scientist publishes first, that is prior art and the corporate patent won't hold up in court. Indeed, if the USPTO were not being criminally negligent in its fudiciary duties under the constitution, it wouldn't even grant the patent in such a case.
A lot of internet information is crap... So why would you want to preserve all of it? Why not just get the good stuff and maybe he won't need so many comptuers.
And of course, you're going to decide what is "good" and what "isn't?" He is providing the resource for, among other things, scholarly researchers. Of what use is the data if it has been hand edited according to one person's aesthetics or anothers?
Indeed, your comment reminds me of one that was heard quite often, shortly before beautiful and irreplacable old buildings were razed to make way for a new strip mall, or, in downtown Chicago, a couple of new government buildings whose architectural style is best described as "Federal Drab." Preserving as much as possible is a good thing, because none of us can tell what will be valuable, and what will not, in another 20 or 30 years, and no one's aesthetic should be dictating such a decision to entire generations to come.
Gentoos portage of the Xfree doesnt support the 9700 yet. (Thou I saw 4.2.99-3 was out last week, which might) I know the CVS version of Xfree did find my 9700 with --configure.
I'm considering a 9700-pro.
Do you find cvs-xfree to provide adeqaute 2d performance / support?
Have you tried ATI's new binary drivers (for good 3d support) and if so, how did you find them?
TIA
1. A package format is expected to provide more than a mere compressed archive of files. Tar is an _archive_ format, not a _package_ format. I'd ask you kindly not to post a response to this comment until you understand the difference.
.debs, or what have you).
... are you going to take issue and declare that none of those developers release packages, merely archives?) and its availability to the distribution user, generally much quicker than binary equivelents (though Mandrake Cooker, as another pointed out, is fairly good at keeping current, albeit at a stability cost the source based distros don't suffer from). Other advantages include a 20-30% speed improvement from compiling the system optimized for the hardware it will run on, added stability by eliminating the sort of subtle incompatabilities binaries often suffer from when compiled against a slightly different library revision, and so on.
Translation: "I disagree with you, therefor you are an ignorant fuck. Please shut up until such a time as you agree, both with my definitions and my conclusions."
The difference between an archive and a package is one of semantics. A tarball can easilly contain all of the information necessary for a package to be built, indeed, most source tarballs these days do exactly that.
You want to define a standard for that, go right ahead. But do not in the process favor one distribution over another, or chuck out a perfectly good archival approach that is a widely adopted, cross-platform standard for one that is obfuscated, inferior, less widely adopted, and less generic.
Such as standard could be as easy as a parsable, human readable text file "dependencies.txt" in the top tarball directory, for example. There are any number of solutions to that requirement, almost all of which are more elegant than RPMs (or
Furthermore, not all distributions use binaries. Any standard that makes an assumption that all od (as LSB to some extent does, by adopting RPM) is inherently inadequate and broken. Indeed, acceptance of such a standard would likely inhibit a fair degree of development and progress in the GNU/Linux community, particularly when it comes to exploring less traditional methods of package organization, handling, and distribution.
For example, many distributions, such as Gentoo and Source Mage, use source and build the installation dynamically. Debian apt-get source is another such example. All of these have the advantage of having a very short time-to-market between the developers release of a package (generally in tar format
In short, there are compelling reasons why adding a binary package format, particularly one such as RPM, will not have a beneficial affect for Linux as a whole (though it certainly does benefit Red Hat).
Using incompatability between rpm's produced by different distros as an argument against rpm as the LSB standard package format is really back-asswards, given that the one of the main points of the LSB is to _ensure_ distribution interoperability.
If that is indeed its purpose (and I don't dispute that), then it is already a miserable failure. Suse and Redhat RPMs that are LSB compliant still break from time to time when used on the other platform, so clearly LSB compliance alone isn't enough to guarantee compatability anyway.
An rpm made in adherence to the LSB spec will work on any LSB-compliant distribution.
That may be the claim, but as noted above, it simply isn't true. LSB compliant RPMs still fail to be compatible across distributions. By including RPM in the standard they've created a Red Hat specific loop everyone is expected to jump through, yet the dubious benefits it purports to offer remain unrealized, indeed, are quite possibly unattainable without hamstringing diversity to the point where all distros are required to be One Distro for compliance, a la the woefully misguided "United Linux" initiative.
RPMs are ugly, unwieldly, distribution specific, and an unnecessary complication that has no place in the LSB standard. Were it not for politics and certain entities wielding undue influence on the standards body in question, it never would have been included, and the LSB standard would have been better for it (and much more widely adopted).
Your kneejerk reaction to his decision to patent his idea is a most unfortunate and immature one. First of all, a biotech company is not an IT company or an internet startup. You can't start them in your garage. You need lots of expensive equipment and expensive highly trained professionals to work with it in the labs. You must also run testing trials, many of them which are also expensive. All of this takes money. Not millions, but billions.
Your kneejerk reaction to defend the privatization and monopolization of human knowledge is unfortunate. Government entitlements in general are antithetical to free markets, government monopoly entitlements particularly so.
1) Biotech and pharma companies routinely exaggerate their R&D costs, often by orders of magnitude, rolling standard corporate costs of doing business into the sum total.
2) most bio and pharma research is done with a mixture of private and public capital, yet those donating money to (e.g.) AIDS research are not given a portion of the "ownership" once the patent is granted. Indeed, that same patent prohibits, by force of a government gun, the donator from persuing research along the very same lines his or her donation helped to initially fund.
3) Patents stifle research. This has been demonstrated historically time and time again. The Wright Brother's patent led to the United States falling a generation behind in aircraft technology, stifling improvements so much so that with the advent of World War I the US government, in an unprecedented move (and a tacit admission that patents do in fact stifle progress, no surprise since they are antithetical to competition which unlike patents actually does promote progress) seized their patent, opened it up to all comers to promote competition, and granted the Wright Brothers an arbitrary 1% royalty so that the technology would be improved and we'd have a fighting chance against the much more advanced German aircraft (whose builders had not been hamstrung by such patents).
More recently, several lines of research into potential cures for breast cancer and AIDS have been stopped, in response to Cease and Desist letters sent by patent holders very similiar to the person you so blindly laud.
Your anti-slashot ranting and raving aside, monopolies are antithetical to competition, antithetical to free markets, and antithetical to progress. Yes, they enrich the inventor (sometimes, often they do not, they enrich instead the inventor's employer), but even in the best case (such as the Wright Brother's invention of the airplane, or perhaps this case), all further improvements on the technology will only come from a very limited group: the patent holder themself, or those few they license to use the patent. Vast numbers of researchers are thus excluded, and a vast number of improvements essentially left unexplored for at least 20 years.
With fundamental science like this, that's a lot of research, a lot of unrealized cures or treatments, and a lot of dead people as a result. Not in Fantastic Land, in the real, hard world.
There are other methods to funding research besides granting government entitlements to 20-year monopolies, and almost all of them are vastly better than the patent system we are employing today.
Just a second... to save the race from the Singularity? The Singularity is a good thing. If you read Vinge's essay, or any of the other essays on the subject, you'll find that people look forward to this event and are actively trying to move the date forward. One fellow says that the definition of morally good is that which makes the Singularity happen sooner.
... it simply, gradually and incrementally, sees what is beyond the horizon and eventually goes there, seeing and experiencing what we who have not gone there cannot.
... running an operating system and distribution (Gentoo) which has upgraded packages available every single day. I can get up each morning, to an 'emerge rsync ; emerge -up world ; emerge -u world' and perform the kind of software upgrades, each and every day, that used to happen once every couple of years, then once every few months, now, perhaps, for those who think they're really leading edge in the proprietary world, every few weeks. I do it every day, and I'm sure a time will come when one could do such every hour, every minute, every second, and, someday, probably every microsecond.
... and this sort of fearmongering by luddites such as Bill Joy (yes, I know how me made his fortune ... but remember, those who made yesterdays technologies are often the worst luddites against tommorow's) is both disingenuous and destructive to our society, our culture, and our quest for knowledge.
The singularity is neither good nor bad, merely unpredictable. That having been said, I don't believe there is or ever will be a Vinge style singularity.
Or, put another way, we've been through a dozen singuarlities already. Do you think the future as it played out among the ancient Egyptians was comprehensible, imaginable to the hunter-gatherers five thousand years earlier? Was human flight (with anything other than angel's wings) imaginable to the 9th century serfs in [insert your favorite Christian Country here]? And while Jules Verne was able to imagine submarines and rockets, certainly computers, much less the virtual, digital lives we lead on them, were incomprehensible not only to him, but to our own parents a scant thirty years ago.
Was there any magical, discontinuity that happened as a result?
No, because there is no singularity, there never was a singularity, and there never will be a singularity. An airplane or a ship doesn't suddenly drop off the edge of the earth or experience some other weird discontinuity merely because it flies or sales over the horizon
So too with the so-called technological singularity. It is merely a horizon beyond which we cannot see from our current vantage point. When we reach this horizon (and cross it) there won't be some sudden, miraculous (or disasterous) break, there will simply be yet another incremental, continuious change in our technology and its impact on our lives.
I live farther up the exponential curve of human knowledge and technology than most
So what? When that time comes, our ability to grasp and keep up with these changes, via tools (such as portage) or enhancements to our own minds, or what have you, will keep pace. The changes will come ever faster, but they will remain incremental, continuous changes, not dramatic, sudden, event-horizon style discontinuities or big technological division-by-zeros that the messianic and hysterical alike imagine.
The mere fact that many of these changes are beyond our current technological horizon, are beyond our current imagination and ability to concieve, doesn't make them in any way mysterious, miraculous, dangerous, or magical